Mass Murderers

Day 13

Today, I had to write a letter to a mass murderer. The obvious first step then would be picking a mass murderer. My friend and I searched for one for a while on the internet, and after about 45 minutes of paroling through depressing pages of death counts and vivid descriptions of creatively mutilated bodies, we decided on Dennis Rader (don't look him up unless you want to become very depressed). Looking at this kind of thing is different than watching Criminal Minds. At the end of the show, I can always tell myself that the things that took place were fiction, fabricated by a group of writers sitting around an oval shaped table- but these victims are real. It's not coincidence that four people all murdered in the same night all had the same last name.
Then came the issue of the letter. What does one say to a mass murderer? Before I read about him, I thought about writing a rather compassionate letter. However, with the names of his victims haunting my vivid imagination, I have nothing but disgust for him. But telling him how wrong what he did is wouldn't really do anything- I'm sure he's been told before. The fact that he was able to do those things shows that his mind woks differently than ours, so trying to make him feel bad for what he did? Won't work. I researched the minds of serial killers for a little while, but didn't really get much. I decided that I didn't really need to put too much work into making him feel bad-- just giving him a short reminder that people hate him is enough I guess. Here is what I wrote:

Dennis Rader,
     You are a **** face. 

Surprisingly enough, that is the product of several drafts (all longer than the final version). Nothing elaborate or eloquent, but it gets the point across. I don't expect it to keep him up at night, but as long as he doesn't count it as fan mail (which, with a mind like his, is a distinct possibility), I'll feel alright. I don't have any stamps of envelopes though, so I'll have to mail it on Monday.